When Dr. Marissa Maliakal Anto and Kevin Edward Anthony met in April 2023, they couldn’t believe they had grown up on nearby streets in Dix Hills, N.Y., and never crossed paths. In fact, Anthony’s school bus passed Anto’s home every day.
Their lives continued on parallel tracks when both moved to Cambridge, Mass., for college, both living there from 2006 to 2008.
Yet it took Bumble to bring them together.
Both were seeking something lasting. “I was definitely hoping for love,” Anto said. She had moved to New York City in the fall of 2022 from Philadelphia. She was renting an apartment in Hudson Yards and commuting to Philadelphia for her job as a pediatric neurologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Anthony was living on the Lower East Side, working as an investment analyst at Moody’s. “My friends were settling down and starting families, and I also wanted that for myself,” he said.
After messaging for a few days, Anthony asked Anto on a date to the New Museum on the Lower East Side to see contemporary works, followed by drinks at Jadis, a wine bar nearby.
He chose the museum on purpose, he said. “You can tell a lot about a person from what they share about their impressions of something as subjective as art,” he said.
When he saw Anto at the museum’s entrance, Anthony said he was “caught off guard.” “In her Bumble profile pictures, she looked very down to earth and simple in a good way, but she showed up impeccably dressed in a chic outfit,” he said.
As they walked through the galleries, they made small talk and exchanged observations about the works on display.
It wasn’t until they sat down for Croatian wine at Jadis that they began to realize how much they had in common. “As we compared notes, the overlap felt almost absurd,” Anto said. “What began as a coincidence came to feel like divine timing.”
They talked for hours, touching on topics such as being children of immigrants — her parents are from Kerala, India; his mother is from Malawi and his father is from Tobago — and sharing values around family, education and social justice.
The two began speaking by phone several times a week. Their second date, a few weeks later, was dinner at the vegan restaurant Planta Queen in the NoMad neighborhood of Manhattan, followed by margaritas at Seeyamañana nearby. There, as they sat on bar stools sipping tamarind margaritas, Anthony leaned in to kiss Anto. “I wanted to find out if Marissa might be my last first kiss,” he said. She got butterflies.
Anto, 40, grew up in Dix Hills, then Muttontown, N.Y. In addition to her work at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, she is an assistant professor of neurology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a bachelor’s in the history of art and architecture from Harvard and a master’s in community health and development studies from the London School of Economics. She received her medical degree from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.
Anthony, 47, grew up in Riverside, Calif., then Dix Hills. He holds a bachelor’s in economics from Yale and an M.B.A. from the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management. He continues to work at Moody’s.
After their second date, they became intertwined in each other’s lives. They took walks along the East River, across the Williamsburg Bridge and through various neighborhoods, going to art galleries in Chelsea and to jazz clubs.
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In April 2024, Anto moved into Anthony’s Lower East Side apartment, and that August, they moved into another unit in the building, which remains their home.
The couple became engaged in May 2025 when Anthony took Anto to the Regal Essex Crossing movie theater near their apartment for what he told her was a private screening of “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.”
She had a feeling something was up when she spotted friends and family as they walked into the theater. During the previews, Anthony appeared on-screen in a trailer he created using artificial intelligence, asking Anto to marry him. When the lights came on, she saw him in the aisle on one knee. Two dozen family members and friends cheered in the background.
They married on May 8, with one guest present, Anto’s brother, Joseph Anto, in a hotel room at the Mandarin Oriental New York. Judge Terrence Matthew Jones of the Superior Court of Los Angeles — who had been Anthony’s college roommate — officiated.
A Catholic ceremony before 120 guests followed at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle on the Upper West Side, which incorporated Kerala Syro-Malabar Catholic traditions in a nod to Anto’s roots.
On May 9, Anto’s 40th birthday, the couple hosted a reception for guests in the grand ballroom of the Mandarin Oriental. Their first dance was to Stevie Wonder’s “Ribbon in the Sky,” accompanied by a saxophonist.
“Every day will never be enough time to be with Marissa,” Anthony said. “I found her later in life, but I found the perfect one.”
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